E-DRUG: Data-mining award for WHO Drug Safety Research Team
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Please see below a press release that was sent today, 30 August 2005, from the WHO Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring to various media organizations. As many of you are aware this Collaborating Centre, on behalf of WHO and its Member States, maintains the global adverse drug reaction reports database. This database, resulting from the close interactions between National Pharmacovigilance Centres and WHO, was used in performing ground-breaking research (mentioned in the note for the press) to detect duplicate reports in very large data sets.
Dr M R Couper
Medical Officer,
Quality Assurance and Safety of Medicines
Medicines Policy and Standards
World Health Organization
Tel: +41 2279 13643/12337
Email: couperm@who.int
News
Immediate
Top International Award for WHO Drug Safety Research Team
A young specialist team, from Uppsala, Sweden, working on drug safety data on behalf of the WHO, has just won the award for Best Applications Paper at the 11th ACM SIGKDD International Conference in Chicago, USA.
This is the major, annual global conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), involving around 714 specialists from a wide range of disciplines and areas of human activity all over the world.
The paper (A hit-miss model for duplicate detection in the WHO drug safety database), resulting from research by Niklas Norén, Roland Orre and Andrew Bate, of the Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC), dealt with an automated method for detecting duplicate entries in very large data sets - a significant problem which, up to now, had been unresolved.
To get reliable results from analysis of nearly 3.5 million reports in the WHO Drug Safety Database (received from more than 75 countries), for example, the detection of duplicate entries is a critical process. The issue is equally important for government databases, and industrial, commercial, financial and medical applications of all kinds.
UMC Director, Professor Ralph Edwards, expressed his delight at the award:
"While we work in a small - but important - corner of human affairs, our Research and Development team has come up with a solution which is useful in different applications and whose significance has been recognised as first class by a group of leading international experts."
Niklas Norén presented the paper at a special session of the conference (held in Chicago 21-24 August 2005). As well as the kudos of winning, the team also received a prize of US$1,000 between them.
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For further information, please contact Prof Ralph Edwards: +46 18 65 60 60, <mailto:ralph.edwrads@who-umc.org> ralph.edwards@who-umc.org; or Niklas Norén: +46 18 65 60 60, <mailto:niklas.noren@who-umc.org> niklas.noren@who-umc.org.
A copy of the paper is accessible at: <http://www.who-umc.org/XXXXX> www.who-umc.org/ >What's New and in the Proceedings of the Conference.